The British government has denied that a mysterious object filmed during British missile testing in the Australian desert in 1964 was a UFO.

When UK television viewers saw the BBC footage of an abandoned test of the Blue Streak missile at Woomera in South Australia in the 1960s, it caused quite a shock.

And many wrote to the Ministry of Defence (MOD) with their concerns, asking for an explanation.

English documentary-maker Jenny Randles went to investigate the footage in 1996, only to discover the one canister containing the evidence was missing from the National Archives.

Randles came up with her TV documentary, 'Tales of the Paranormal', which was seen by MP, John Fraser, who launched an inquiry into the incident and the missing footage.

But newly released files from the MOD reveal far from being an unidentified flying object, the flying saucer was just a trick of the light.

"When they actually looked at the papers back in 1964, British Pathe Film, who were actually there at the rocket launch and made the film, they wrote in to the MOD and said, 'yeah there was something on the film but it's quite clear to us looking at it that it's an internal camera fault, like a reflection in the lens'," News.com.au quoted David Clarke, author of The UFO Files and a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, as saying.

"It just looks as if it's an object next to the rocket, but really it's just a trick of the light. It just shows you how a really complex UFO legend can grow up out of something that's nothing really," he stated.

The missing canister of filmed "evidence" had been stored at the Imperial War Museum instead of the National Archives, and so the mystery was finally put to bed. (ANI)